Multi-channel sales engagement platform, Outplay today announced its $7.3M series A fundraise from Sequoia Capital India. Outplay will use the funds raised to invest in technology and hiring exceptional talent across the globe.
Businesses today rely on a combination of inbound and outbound sales models to drive revenues. While the inbound sales process has rapidly evolved over the last 10 years, outbound sales hasn’t. Outbound sales teams typically use high-volume tactics to drive revenue. But this approach is not scalable and the revenue eventually becomes a function of the size of the outbound sales team. This is because outbound sales teams don?t have a data-driven approach for targeting prospects that are most likely to convert and end up spending time emailing or cold-calling hundreds of prospects hoping to convert a few.
Launched in 2019, Outplay is on a mission to change this by bringing predictability to outbound sales and help every salesperson talk to the right prospect at the right time through the right channel. The platform helps outbound sales teams plan, execute, track, measure and optimize interactions between companies and their prospects across multiple channels like email, phone, SMS, social media as well as live chat.
Laxman Papineni, CEO of Outplay commented, “Outbound sales teams are truly the dark horse of the sales organization – the targets are high, but the methods aren’t scientific. Outplay is committed to making outbound outreach data-driven, so that sales teams are talking only to the warmest prospects at any given point across multiple channels, optimizing time and resources. The continued partnership with Sequoia Capital India is a testament to the fact that the sales engagement space, which is poised to be a $5.59B market by 2023, is a huge opportunity for Outplay.”
With Outplay, sales managers can create data-backed sales playbooks to coach their team members and help them achieve their sales targets. The platform’s combination of automation and personalization helps teams start genuine conversations at scale, enabling them to stay on task by using multiple channels through a single interface to drive more meetings. Sales reps are thus able to build a multi-channel outreach plan for their prospects across email, phone, SMS, LinkedIn, Twitter and chat.
For example, Outplay helps sales teams engage with warm prospects by notifying them when their prospect visits their business website. Enabled by Outplay’s industry-first outbound live-chat feature, Magic Outbound Chat, the rep can initiate live chat and have a contextual conversation with the prospect. Customers have been able to qualify prospects faster and grow their pipeline by 300% using the tool alongside inbound chat.
“We continue to be very excited by Outplay’s mission of making every sales rep perform like the best rep on the team. Outbound sales needs are evolving rapidly and reps now need personalized, automated and contextual tools to drive sales which Outplay is successfully enabling. Sales reps spend an average of four hours per day on Outplay, demonstrating the effectiveness of the product which has category-leading customer reviews. Additionally, rapid digitization due to COVID has been a significant accelerant for the business and we believe these tailwinds will continue as outbound sales becomes more digital,” Harshjit Sethi, Principal, Sequoia India.
